High School Activities

Students should also create a detailed map of food resources in their area, classified by type and annotated with accessibility and time constraints. Then, they should evaluate whether their neighborhood or district is a food desert. How does the students' map compare with the Food Access Research Atlas?

While nuclear materials are part of the earth’s crust and have been for millions of years, the modern history of harnessing nuclear energy for power generation is relatively short. Nuclear fission was first discovered in 1939, and the first controlled nuclear chain reaction took place in Chicago as part of the wartime Manhattan Project in 1942.

Students should identify a single historical or contemporary individual that made a significant contribution to the fields of energy, chemistry, physics, environmental science, or a related field. Students should explain the relationship between that scientist's work and previous and following work in the field. Special note should be made of collaboration, cross-disciplinary work, and the contribution of any women, minorities, or people of color.

Leveraging the Minecraft: Education Edition produced by Microsoft, Careers in Chemistry is a new game-based experience aimed at showcasing chemistry-related career opportunities to high school students. The program features chemistry professor and science entertainer Dr. Kate Biberdorf of the University of Texas at Austin.

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system always increases as energy is converted. Moving from fuel (high order) to heat or smoke (low order) is a natural process of entropy. Pollution with the highest disorder or highest entropy is the hardest to clean up.

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy in a closed system can neither be created nor destroyed but rather goes through a series of conversions from one form to another. The details of several conversions anchor the fundamentals of thinking about energy more concretely as a global industrial sector.